She’s been attending
Trail Blazers basketball games since 1996, when her family used earnings
from its trash-hauling company to buy season tickets at the Rose
Garden. She added her own seat five years ago.

But last weekend,
Leichner found herself driving up Interstate 5, all the way into Canada,
to watch a game—not her beloved basketball, but soccer.

Last year, Leichner
purchased season tickets to the Portland Timbers, the city’s ascending
Major League Soccer franchise. Those tickets don’t include games out of
town, of course, but her growing passion for the Timbers inspired the
five-hour drive to British Columbia to watch her new team’s Oct. 6 match
against the Vancouver Whitecaps.

“I used to look at
Timbers games as a social event to fill the months where there were no
Blazer games,” Leichner says. “Now I’m going to root on my team.”

For more than four
decades, there was no question which professional team owned Portland.
The Blazers were the core of any local sports fan’s identity.

WW Asks: If you could have one free ticket to a Portland sports game, which one would you choose?

Bill Walton, Bill
Schonely, Clyde the Glide: These legends gave the city a rallying point,
and offered a place on the national stage. (They were often the only
thing outsiders knew about Portland.) Even the low points—the Jail
Blazer arrests, the bad draft picks, the calamitous injuries—were misery
shared with company.

The Timbers? The
soccer team was an eccentric interest that crested now and again, in a
series of leagues too obscure to take seriously. Sure, the rambunctious
Timbers Army made things interesting—if you liked circuses and
sing-alongs where the sporadic game might break out.

But this fall, as the
basketball and soccer seasons overlap, a funny thing has happened: The
Timbers have overtaken the Blazers as Portland’s hot ticket, and are
poised to usurp the title of Stumptown’s signature sport.

Soccer just seems
hipper. The oddities of the game—its Eurocentric flavor, its reliance on
crowd participation, its appeal to mustachioed baristas—dovetail with
the rise of a young downtown culture.

And most importantly,
the team is really good. Coach Caleb Porter has taken the players’
strengths—the acrobatics of Darlington Nagbe, the scrappiness of Will
Johnson, and the reliability of Donovan Ricketts, to name only three—and
forged a high-octane powerhouse.

Meanwhile, the
Blazers are entering another rebuilding season, still trying to rebound
from the double whammy of Brandon Roy and Greg Oden’s wrecked knees.
(Top draft pick CJ McCollum has already broken his foot.) The basketball
arena may have a new name—the much-derided Moda Center—but everything
else, from the uncertain quality of the team to the suburban cheesiness
of the McMuffin giveaway, feels deflatingly familiar.

Portland now has two
major-league teams. We have other sports—the Winterhawks can point to
their junior-league hockey championships, and the minor-league-baseball
Hillsboro Hops are adorable. But for sports that bring national networks
to town, the choice boils down to basketball or soccer.

The fight for the hearts—and dollars—of Portland fans is now a legitimate contest.

In the articles linked at the top and bottom of the article (or collected here), we look at the teams represented by Blaze the Trail Cat and Timber Joey. WW
has asked some of the city’s most passionate fans to make the case for
their sport’s supremacy. We’ve analyzed the contest by the numbers.
We’ve compared the fat-cat owners. And we concluded…well, we’re not
going to give away the final score.

As for Leichner, she’ll still pick the Blazers over the Timbers every time.